Le Pen has started her electoral campaign and her political platform is very clear: a witch hunt against immigrant workers. It’s a diversion and it’s sick-making.
Who’s holding us to ransom at the gas station? Immigrants or the vultures at the head of TotalEnergies and other oil companies who pocket billions? Who but a bunch of parasites and heirs – like Peugeot, Agnelli, Mulliez – is closing down factory after factory, depriving workers all over the world of their only source of income? Who’s lowering our wages and making our working conditions worse: our poor neighbors living on state aid or big shareholders who have never dirtied their hands?
Le Pen claims that she’ll solve the housing problem. But her ‘solution’ isn’t forcing Vinci and Bouygues to build more housing and renovate existing buildings. It’s not the requisition of vacant housing. It consists in ‘national preference’. She wants to take housing away from home helps, workers, cleaners – everyone who is essential to the functioning of society.
Immigrant workers could spend their life breaking their back building and renovating public housing without ever being able to live there! And when Le Pen talks of cutting housing aid for some, it isn’t so that the money can go to help French people who need it but to put money back into the state’s budget so that the rich don’t have to do it.
Dividing workers and pitting them against each other in this way, at a moment when we all face increasingly difficult working and living conditions, is disgusting.
Workers belong to the same class
Why should workers have to fight one another to see who has the right to housing, a paycheck, a place in daycare or decent treatment in hospital? And yet again, immigrant workers would only have the right to work themselves to the bone?
We will keep regressing if we think this way, if we don’t realize that we should only be attacking the parasites and exploiters, i.e. big business.
Bernard Arnault’s sons and daughters will never have to wait years for public housing. They already own several palaces and second homes in different countries.
They have access to private clinics and private doctors. They’ll never need to be put on a waiting list for an operation. When we, the working class, can no longer visit our parents or friends at the weekend because gas is too expensive, they can squander thousands of euros in just one night.
Our only enemies
Right now, there’s a self-important billionaire, MC Pao, who’s invited onto TV shows, dripping with contempt for the working class. He’s saying that his lifestyle costs 20 million euros a year and that he can spend 200,000 euros on a single dinner. His hospital company – he’s one of the people who makes their profits off our health – is going to get rid of office workers who’ll be replaced by AI. And he’s just a small-time billionaire compared to others who are more discrete and who accumulate dozens of billions and are harmful on a much larger scale.
We need to look closely at these billionaires because they’re the ones reaping the benefits of our work, the collective work of French and immigrant workers alike.
Le Pen wants workers to fight one another. But we need to fight our exploiters. Whatever our origin or the color of our skin, getting up at 4 in the morning is exhausting for everyone. Carrying out the same movement on a production line wears out the same tendons and nerves. To combat demagogues like Le Pen and the big bosses who pull every possible string to divide us, we need to become aware once more of our common interests.
Let’s get back on the class struggle road
We’ll be crushed by the steamroller of the bourgeoisie unless we put an end to our passivity. On September 29, public servants and firefighters are being called to come out on strike for their pay and for more resources. These are problems faced by all wage earners.
Others would like to occupy the roundabouts again, which is what happened during the yellow-vest movement. If the will to act spreads through the working class, it should be used against the capitalists who condemn us to sharing the crumbs that they deign to leave us.
Nathalie Arthaud